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black holes

SPACE: Are There Huge Black Holes Out There?

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black hole - pixabay

Black holes can get big … really big. But just how big? It’s possible they could top out at over a trillion times more massive than the sun. That’s 10 times bigger than the largest known black hole so far. But could these monsters truly exist in our universe? A team of researchers has come up with a plan to go hunting for them. And if they exist, they could help us solve the mysteries of how the first stars appeared in the cosmos. If you want to go shopping for black holes in the universe, unfortunately you only have … Read more

Can You Suck Energy OUT of a Black Hole?

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black hole - pixabay

A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to do just this, now known as the “Penrose Process.” The method could be used by sophisticated civilizations (aliens or future humans) to harvest energy by making “black hole bombs.” Some of the physics required to do so, however, had never been experimentally verified — until now. Our study confirming the … Read more

SPACE: How Close Can You Get to a Black Hole?

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black hole - pixabay

Streams of gas fall to their dooms, plunging into black holes, locked away from the universe forever. In their final moments, these gassy shreds send out one last flare of light, some of the brightest emissions in the universe. These death dives are too far away to be seen directly, but astronomers have devised a new technique for detecting their panicked cries for help. They’re using the method to test our knowledge of gravity in the most extreme environments in the universe. In a new study, physicists looked at specific features of that light to figure out the closest you … Read more

SPACE: Three Black Holes Are About to Collide

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black holes - deposit photos

A rare trio of supermassive black holes has been caught in the act of coming together. Three of the light-gobbling monsters nuzzle shoulder to shoulder in SDSS J084905.51+111447.2, a system of three merging galaxies about 1 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reports. “We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” lead author Ryan Pfeifle, of George Mason University in Virginia, said in a statement. “This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes.” … Read more

SPACE: Colliding Galaxies Create Ring of Black Holes

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Giant Ring of Black Holes

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study. The bright X-ray source emanates from the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 (abbreviated AM 0644), which lies approximately 300 million light-years from Earth. By combining data from Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers created a … Read more

SPACE: Cosmic Zombies

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Cosmic Zombies - NASA

Close encounters with medium-size black holes can reanimate dead stars, if only momentarily, a new study suggests. A team of astronomers performed computer simulations to determine what happens when a burned-out stellar corpse known as a white dwarf passes close to an intermediate-mass black hole — one that harbors between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of Earth’s sun. The researchers determined that the black hole’s powerful gravity can stretch and distort the white dwarf’s previously inert innards so dramatically that nuclear-fusion processes can reignite for a few seconds, converting helium, carbon and oxygen into heavier elements such as iron. … Read more

SCIENCE: How to Get Inside a Black Hole

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black hole - pixabay

SCIENCE Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of “Hawking radiation,” but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can’t be contacted, it’s future can’t be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and … Read more

SCIENCE: Are We Living in a Hologram?

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Hologram - Pixabay

In the late 1990s, theoretical physicists uncovered a remarkable connection between two seemingly unrelated concepts in theoretical physics. That connection is almost inscrutably technical, but it might have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of gravity and even the universe. To illustrate this connection, we’re going to start at — of all places — a black hole. Researchers have found that when a single bit of information enters a black hole, its surface area increases by a very precise amount: the square of the Planck length (equal to an incredibly small 1.6 x 10^-35 meters on a side). At first blush, … Read more